Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504

By Laurence Bergreen

From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer.

Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous, but they revealed Columbus's uncanny sense of the sea, his mingled brilliance and delusion, and his superb navigational skills. In all these exploits he almost never lost a sailor. By their conclusion, however, Columbus was broken in body and spirit. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the latter voyages illustrate the tragic costs- political, moral, and economic.

In rich detail Laurence Bergreen re-creates each of these adventures as well as the historical background of Columbus's celebrated, controversial career. Written from the participants' vivid perspectives, this breathtakingly dramatic account will be embraced by readers of Bergreen's previous biographies of Marco Polo and Magellan and by fans of Nathaniel Philbrick, Simon Winchester, and Tony Horwitz.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Release date: Sep 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781101544327

Laurence Bergreen

Laurence Bergreen is the author of the highly acclaimed biographies ‘Capone: The Man and his Era’, ‘As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin’, ‘James Agee: A Life’ and ‘Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

PART ONE - Discovery

CHAPTER 1 - Thirty-three Days

CHAPTER 2 - Son of Genoa

CHAPTER 3 - Shipwreck

CHAPTER 4 - The People from the Sky

PART TWO - Conquest

CHAPTER 5 - River of Blood

CHAPTER 6 - Rebellion

CHAPTER 7 - Among the Taínos

INTERLUDE - The Columbian Exchange

PART THREE - Decadence

CHAPTER 8 - A Great Roaring

CHAPTER 9 - Roldán’s Revolt

CHAPTER 10 - Send Me Back in Chains

PART FOUR - Recovery

CHAPTER 11 - El Alto Viaje

CHAPTER 12 - Castaways in Paradise

CHAPTER 13 - February 29, 1504

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

NOTES ON SOURCES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

ALSO BY LAURENCE BERGREEN

ALSO BY LAURENCE BERGREEN

Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying

Circumnavigation of the Globe

Voyage to Mars: NASA’s Search for Life Beyond Earth

Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life

Capone: The Man and the Era

As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin

James Agee: A Life

Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broadcasting

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England

First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Laurence Bergreen, 2011

All rights reserved

Illustration credits begin on page 421.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Bergreen, Laurence.

Columbus : the four voyages / Laurence Bergreen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54432-7

E118.B47 2011

970.01’5092—dc22 2011013900

Maps by Jeffery L. Ward

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TO MY MOTHER

and

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER AND BROTHER

A BATTER’D, wreck’d old man,

Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,

Pent by the sea, and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,

Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken’d, and nigh to death,

I take my way along the island’s edge,

Venting a heavy heart. . . .

Steersman unseen! henceforth the helms are Thine;

Take Thou command—(what to my petty skill Thy navigation?)

My hands, my limbs grow nerveless;

My brain feels rack’d, bewilder’d; Let the old timbers part—I will not

part!

I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me;

Thee, Thee, at least, I know.

Is it the prophet’s thought I speak, or am I raving?

What do I know of life? what of myself?

I know not even my own work, past or present;

Dim, ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,

Of newer, better worlds, their mighty parturition,

Mocking, perplexing me.

And these things I see suddenly—what mean they?

As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes,

Shadowy, vast shapes, smile through the air and sky,

And on the distant waves sail countless ships,

And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

—from Prayer of Columbus, Walt Whitman, 1871

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea

Bartholomew Columbus, his brother, the Adelantado (Advancer)

Diego Columbus, his brother

Felipa Moñiz, his wife

Diego Columbus, his son with Felipa Moñiz

Ferdinand Columbus, his son with Beatriz de Arana

Ferdinand II of Aragon, king of Castile

Isabella I of Castile

Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, bishop and chaplain to Isabella

João II of Portugal, the Perfect Prince

Manuel I of Portugal

Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, sailor of Palos, Spain

Martín Alonso Pinzón, brother of Vicente

Francisco Martín Pinzón, brother of Vicente

Diego Alvarez Chanca, physician, friend of Columbus

Juan de la Cosa, cartographer

Father Ramon Pané, priest, emissary to the Taínos

Antonio de Torres, associate of Columbus

Luis de Torres, translator on the first voyage

Guacanagarí, Taíno cacique

Guarionex, cacique

Caonabó, Carib cacique

Anacaona, Caonabó’s wife, executed by the Spanish

The Quibián, cacique

Alonso de Ojeda, Columbus’s lieutenant and rival

Amerigo Vespucci, Florentine bureaucrat and explorer

Francisco Roldán, mutineer on the third voyage

Francisco de Bobadilla, judicial investigator

Nicolás de Ovando, governor of Hispaniola

Francisco Porras, mutineer on the fourth voyage

Diego Méndez, leader of rescue mission on the fourth voyage

Bartolomé de Las Casas, soldier, friar, chronicler

PROLOGUE

October 1492

002

I sailed to the West southwest, and we took more water aboard than at any other time on the voyage, wrote Christopher Columbus in his logbook on Thursday, October 11, 1492, on the verge of the defining moment of discovery. It occurred not a moment too soon, because the fearful and unruly crews of his three ships were about to mutiny. Overcome with doubt himself, he had tried to remind the rebels of their sworn duty, telling them that, for better or worse, they must complete the enterprise on which the Catholic Sovereigns—Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, who jointly ruled Spain—had sent them. He could not risk offending his royal patrons, whom he lobbied for ten years to obtain this commission, and so he insisted, I started out to find the Indies and will continue until I have accomplished that mission, with the help of Our Lord. And they had better follow his lead or risk a cruel punishment.

Suddenly it seemed as if his prayers had been answered: I saw several things that were indications of land. For one thing, A large flock of sea birds flew overhead. And for another, a slender reed floated past his flagship, Santa María, and it was green, indicating it had grown nearby. Pinta’s crew noticed the same thing, as well as a manmade plank, carved by an unknown hand, perhaps with an iron tool. Those aboard Niña spotted a stick, equally indicative that they were approaching land. He encouraged the crew to give thanks rather than mutiny at this critical moment, doubled the number of lookouts, and promised a generous reward to the first sailor to spot terra firma.

And then, for hours, nothing.

Around ten o’clock that night, Columbus anxiously patrolled the highest deck, the stern castle. In the gloom, he thought he saw something resembling a little wax candle bobbing up and down. Perhaps it was a torch belonging to fishermen abroad at night, or perhaps it belonged to someone on land, going from house to house. Perhaps it was nothing more than a phantom sighting, common at sea, even for expert eyes. He summoned a couple of officers; one agreed with his assessment, the other scoffed. No one else saw anything, and Columbus did not trust his own instincts. As he knew from experience, life at sea often presented stark choices. If he succeeded in his quest to discover the basis of a Spanish empire thousands of miles from home, he would be on his way to fulfilling his pledge to his royal sponsors and attaining heroic status and unimaginable wealth. After all the doubts and trials he had endured, his accomplishment would be vindication of the headiest sort. But if he failed, he would face mutiny by his obstreperous crew, permanent disgrace, and the prospect of death in a lonely patch of ocean far from home.

Throughout the first voyage, Columbus kept a detailed record of his thoughts and actions, in which he sought to justify himself to his Sovereigns, to his Lord, and to himself. He believed that history would be listening. In his record, he began by explaining the premise of the voyage in terms of Reconquista, the reclaiming of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslims who had occupied it for centuries. For Columbus, the success of this military campaign made his voyage possible, and, given his mystical bent, inevitable.

Addressing the most Christian and very Exalted, Excellent and mighty Princes, King and Queen of the Spains and of the Islands of the Sea, our Lord and Lady, in the present year 1492—his Sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, in other words—he reminisced about their war against the Moors (Muslims), especially their memorable retaking of the the very great City of Granada—the former Moorish stronghold. Columbus was there, or so he claimed. He saw the Royal Standards of Your Highnesses appear on the towers of Alhambra, the former seat of Moorish rule. He even saw the Moorish King come forth to the gates of the city and kiss the Royal Hands of Your Highnesses. Even then, Columbus reminded them, he was thinking of his grand design to establish trade with the fabled Grand Khan in the east, the King of Kings. And it so happened, according to his epic recitation of events, that the Sovereigns, avowed enemies of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to send him—Christopher Columbus—to India in order to convert those in distant lands to our Holy Faith—the only faith. Recasting events slightly to flatter Ferdinand and Isabella, he claimed that they ordained that I should not go by land—why, as a mariner, would he?—but by the route of the Occident, in other words, by water.

In reciting this very recent history, Columbus made sure to incorporate the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, accomplished by a royal decree dated March 31, 1492, which he welcomed as the final impetus for his voyage. After all the Jews had been exiled from your realms and dominions in the same month of January Your Highnesses commanded me that with a sufficient fleet I should go to India, and for this granted me many graces. And what graces they were. They ennobled me so that henceforth I might call myself ‘Don’ and be ‘Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Perpetual Governor’ of all the islands and mainland that I should discover and win. Not only that, My eldest son should succeed me, and thus from rank to rank for ever. His preening revealed that hereditary titles and wealth had inspired him to go as much as anything else.

Thereafter, his tone became more practical and objective.

I departed from the city of Granada on the 12th day of the month of May of the same year 1492, on a Saturday, and came to the town of Palos, which is a seaport, where I fitted for the sea three vessels—Niña, Pinta, and his flagship, Santa María—well suited for such an enterprise, and I departed well furnished with very many provisions and many seamen on the third day of the month of August on a Friday, at half an hour before sunrise, and took the route for the Canary Islands of Your Highnesses . . . that I might thence take my course and sail until I should reach the Indies, and give the letters of Your Highnesses to those princes, and thus comply with what you had commanded.

That was the plan, in all its grandeur and simplicity.

His journal was to form an important part of the enterprise, and he explained his purpose: I thought to write down upon this voyage in great detail from day to day all that I should do and see, and encounter. Like all such journals, it had its share of unconscious distortions, intentional omissions, which occurred whenever he deemed it necessary to conceal his route from rivals, or when the reality of his exploration strayed from his expectations. For all its lacunae, it remains the best guide to both his deeds and deceptions. With it, he planned to make a new chart of navigation, upon which I shall place the whole sea and lands of the Ocean Sea in their proper positions under their bearings, and, further, to compose a book, and set down everything as in a real picture. He knew that keeping this record, in addition to all his other duties, would tax his energy to the hilt. Above all it is very important that I forget sleep, he reminded himself, and labor much at navigation, because it is necessary, and which will be a great task.

003

As he embarked on this task, something happened on that October night, something unexpected, appearing sooner than anticipated: the light, if it was a light, from a distant shore, telling him that he had arrived.

The moon rose shortly before midnight, and the little fleet sailed on, making about nine knots. About two o’clock in the morning, a cannon’s roar shattered the calm, startling one and all. It came from Pinta, the fastest of the three ships, and thus in the lead. Columbus instantly knew what it meant: land. I learned that the first man to sight land was Rodrigo de Triana. It lay just six miles to the west.

As Columbus passed a sleepless night, the fleet coasted close enough to the shore for his disgruntled men to spy naked people rather than the sophisticated and handsomely garbed Chinese that he had expected to meet. Based on his naive reading of Marco Polo’s Travels, the navigator believed he had arrived at the eastern shore of China just as he had promised Ferdinand and Isabella he would.

He would spend the rest of his life—and three subsequent voyages—attempting to make good on that pledge. Many in Europe were inclined to dismiss Polo’s account, by turns fantastic and commercial, as a beguiling fantasy, while others, Columbus especially, regarded it as the pragmatic travel guide that Polo intended. His attempt to find a maritime equivalent to Marco Polo’s journey to Asia bridged the gap between the medieval world of magic and might, and the stark universe of predator and prey of the Renaissance. Although Marco Polo had completed his journey two hundred years earlier, Columbus nevertheless expected to find the Mongol empire intact, and Kublai Khan, or another Grand Khan like him, alive and well and ready to do business. But Kublai was long gone, and his empire in ruins.

Protected by his delusion, Columbus conveniently concluded that he had reached an island or peninsula on the outskirts of China, a leap made possible only by omitting the Americas and the Pacific Ocean from his skewed geography. And as for the promised reward, which should have gone to the humble seaman, Rodrigo de Triana, who had first sighted land, Columbus decided that his own vision of the glowing candle took precedence, and so he kept the proceeds for himself.

005

Does it matter anymore? As an explorer, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea is widely seen as an opportunist who made his great discovery without ever acknowledging it for what it was, and proceeded to enslave the populace he found, encourage genocide, and pollute relations between peoples who were previously unknown to each other. He was even assumed to have carried syphilis back to Europe with him to torment Europe for centuries thereafter. He excused his behavior, and his legacy, by saying that he merely acted as God’s instrument, even as he beseeched his Sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to enrich him and his family. Historians have long argued that Columbus merely rediscovered the Americas, that the Vikings, the Celts, and American Indians arrived in the New World long before his cautious landfall. But Columbus’s voyages to the New World differed from all the earlier events in the scope of its human drama and ecological impact. Before him, the Old World and the New remained separate and distinct continents, ecosystems, and societies; ever since, their fates have been bound together, for better or worse.

To the end of his days, Columbus remained convinced that he sailed for, and eventually arrived at, the outskirts of Asia. His unshakeable Chinese delusion motivated his entire subsequent career in exploration. No comparable figure in the age of discovery was so mistaken as to his whereabouts. Had Columbus been the one to name his discovery, he might well have called it Asia rather than America.

Obsessed with his God-given task of finding Asia, Columbus undertook four voyages within the span of a decade, each very different, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. But as the voyages grew in complexity and sophistication, and as Columbus failed to reconcile his often violent experiences as a captain and provincial governor with the demands of his faith, he became progressively less rational and more extreme, until it seemed as if he lived more in his glorious illusions than in the grueling reality his voyages laid bare. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the subsequent three voyages illustrate the costs—political, moral, and economic.

The celebrated first voyage (1492–93) illustrated the discovery of a New World and all its promise, and portended much trouble to come. After this triumph, matters darkened considerably during the hastily assembled second voyage (1493–96). Columbus intended to solidify his navigational accomplishments of the previous year, colonize the New World, and locate China once and for all. But because of his inability to control the men of this vastly expanded fleet, and his inability to solve the China puzzle, he came close to squandering everything he had attained.

The grim third voyage (1498–1500) was entirely different in character, taking Columbus farther south than ever before. Although he kept up a brave pretense of finding China, he was forced to acknowledge that he might have stumbled across a separate and distinct new world. Meanwhile, his management of the fledgling Spanish empire, and his quest for gold, devolved into cruel mistreatment of the Indians. The master of navigation became the victim on land of his lack of administrative ability.

As the voyage proceeded, Columbus became increasingly detached from reality, losing himself in extended mystical reveries. At one point, he persuaded himself he had located the entrance to paradise. Throughout his quest, the rational, in the form of maritime expertise, and the mystical occasionally blended into harmonious action, but more often were at odds, resulting in conflicts extending from the natural world to the supernatural. Despite his web of delusions, Columbus discovered so many lands that if he had succeeded in retaining control of all he had explored, with the right to pass on his titles to his heirs—as Ferdinand and Isabella had once promised—he and his new dynasty would have ruled over a kingdom larger and more powerful than Spain itself. So Ferdinand and Isabella decided to replace him with a lesser official, but, playing to his vanity, they permitted him to retain empty titles such as admiral and viceroy.

Ever resilient, Columbus beseeched his Sovereigns for the means to make one more voyage to the New World. His wish was soon granted, and why not? It was more convenient to send Columbus away than to keep him at home.

The wild fourth voyage (1502–4), often called the High Voyage, was a family enterprise, and Columbus included his young son Ferdinand to help secure the family legacy. Ferdinand’s account of his father’s life is an often overlooked trove of information and observations about Columbus, not as history has judged him, but as his intimates saw him—the story of a father and son caught in the grip of imperial ambition. What began as a journey of personal vindication of his honor ended as a Robinson Crusoe–like adventure of shipwreck and rescue imperiling the lives of all who participated. No wonder it was Columbus’s favorite of his four voyages.

At close range, Columbus’s accomplishments seem anything but foreordained or clear-cut. An aura of chaos hovers over his entire life and adventures, against which he tries to impose his remarkably serene will. But as his son Ferdinand makes clear, his father is always vulnerable—to the whims of monarchs, to tides and storms, and to the moods of the sailors serving under him. He emerges as a hostage to fortune in the high-stakes game of European expansion; time and again, his exploits could have gone one way or another, were it not for his singular vision. 006

A NOTE ON DISTANCES AND DATES

007

Nautical mile: approximately 6,080 feet

Fathom: traditionally the distance between the fingertips of a person’s outstretched arms, or six feet

League: approximately three nautical miles

With minor exceptions, dates are given in the Julian calendar, which had been in effect since 45 BC, and was the calendar Columbus used.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII initiated a new calendar, still in use today, to compensate for accumulated errors in the Julian calendar. Ten days were omitted, so October 5, 1582, became October 15.

Thus, the eclipse Columbus experienced in Jamaica on February 29, 1504, corresponds to March 10, 1504, in the Gregorian calendar.

PART ONE

Discovery

CHAPTER 1

Thirty-three Days

008

On Friday morning, October 12, Columbus ventured ashore, followed by the Pinzón brothers: Martín Alonso, Pinta’s captain, and Vicente Yáñez, Niña’s captain. Only hours before, these two contentious brothers had been ready to mutiny against Columbus, believing that he was leading them to certain destruction; now they were walking on land inhabited by well-meaning people. It was the moment of first contact.

Soon the two parties from separate hemispheres were engrossed in the most basic of rites, trade. The tawny-skinned inhabitants offered squawking, blinking parrots and skeins of cotton thread, for which they received tiny hawk’s bells, used to track birds in falconry, and glass beads from the pallid visitors. The officers unfurled the royal standard, while Columbus, seeking to validate his discovery, summoned the fleet’s secretary and comptroller to witness that I was taking possession of this Island for the King and Queen. In so doing, he claimed a modest coral island in the Bahamas, now generally assumed to be San Salvador.

The people of the island visited by Columbus were the Taínos, a widely distributed ethnic group, skilled at cultivating corn and yams, and making pottery. Despite their peaceful manner, they could be fierce warriors, but they had met their match. The arrival of the Spaniards in the New World heralded the extinction of the Taíno culture, but for now, the tribe possessed a blend of sophistication and innocence that Columbus tried to capture in his diary:

All that I saw were young men, none of them more than 30 years old, very well built, of very handsome bodies and very fine faces; their hair coarse, almost like the hair of a horse’s tail, and short, the hair they wear over their eyebrows, except for a hank behind that they wear long and never cut. Some of them paint themselves black (and they are of the color of the Canary Islanders, neither black nor white), and others paint themselves white, and some red, and others with what they find. And some paint their faces, others the body, some the eyes only, others only the nose. They bear no arms, nor know thereof; for I showed them swords and they grasped them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron. Their darts are a kind of rod without iron, and some have at the end a fish’s tooth and other things.

The Spaniards had come all this way, across the Ocean Sea, expecting to confront a superior civilization. How disconcerting to be confronted with naked people who were very poor in everything. Columbus and his men would have to be careful not to hurt them, rather than the other way around. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies, and made signs to them to ask what it was, and they showed me that people of other islands which are near came there and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believe that people do come here from the mainland to take them as slaves.

Slaves. The idea instantly struck Columbus as plausible, even desirable. They ought to be good servants, he continued, and of good skill, for I see they repeat very quickly whatever was said to them. And, in the same breath, he judged that they would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion. He planned to present six of these nameless, naked individuals to his royal sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, that they may learn to speak.

In the morning, masses of Indians crowded the beach to gape at the three ships from afar. Others arrived by dugout (fashioned like a long boat from the trunk of a tree) carrying forty or fifty men, who propelled themselves with a curious object that the European sailors, despite their lifelong acquaintance with the ocean, had never before seen. Having no word for it, Columbus called it a thing like a baker’s peel, a broad, mostly flat blade attached to a long handle. We know it as a canoe paddle.

They brought additional gifts for Columbus, who dismissed them as trifles too tedious to describe. It was gold that he—and Spain—wanted, not trinkets or parrots. He glimpsed tiny amounts in the form of jewelry piercing their noses, and immediately began asking for the source of this precious metal. If his instincts were correct, the gold came from Çipango—Japan. I intend to go and see if I can find the Island of Çipango, he emphasized. He was confident that the gentle people in their dugout canoes would direct him to the island.

After this first encounter, Columbus’s fleet skirted the coast of San Salvador. Wherever they went, excitement erupted onshore. Some of the startled inhabitants offered food and drink, and others, both men and women, hastened into their boats shouting, Come and see the men who come from the sky! It seemed to Columbus that those ashore were giving thanks to God as they threw themselves on the ground.

He would have made other landfalls, but his nautical instinct warned him away from a great reef of rocks which surrounded the whole of this island. Infuriatingly, inside this reef there are some shoal spots, but the sea moves no more than within a well, and so he sailed on, and on, overwhelmed by the splendor of the Caribbean, its cobalt waters, cottony clouds, and periwinkle skies. To flatter Ferdinand and Isabella, he compared the spectacle to the countryside around Seville in the months of April and May, but in fact the pellucid ocean in which he found himself was even more gorgeous and beguiling. Columbus said that he saw so many islands that I could not decide where to go first; and those men whom I had captured made signs to me that they were so many that they could not be counted, and called by their names more than a hundred. He eventually decided to make for the largest landmass, estimating that it lay five leagues from the island he designated San Salvador.

Exhilarated and distracted, he did not linger at his new anchorage. When from this island I saw another bigger one to the West, I made sail to navigate all that day until nightfall because otherwise I would not have been able to reach the western cape. He called it Santa María de la Concepción, and dropped anchor there at sunset. The island is often assumed to be Rum Cay, to use its more mundane modern name, and one hardly befitting Columbus’s exalted sense of mission.

Driven by the search for gold, he had allowed his wily captives to lead him to this spot because those who dwelled there wore very big bracelets of gold on their legs and arms. When the ships approached the shore, the hostages escaped one by one, and Columbus belatedly realized he had been deceived. Irritated, he would have sailed on, but, he stated, it was my wish to bypass no island without taking possession, and so he did in the name of Castile, even though having taken one you can claim all. Such were the rules of exploration and empire as he understood them.

He dispatched several seamen in hot pursuit of the fugitives, chasing them ashore, but, as he ruefully noted, they all fled like chickens. When another dugout canoe innocently approached with a man who came to trade a skein of cotton, some of the sailors jumped into the sea because he wouldn’t come aboard, and seized the poor fellow as a replacement detainee. Observing from his vantage point on the poop deck, Columbus sent for him and gave him a red cap and some little beads of green glass which I placed on his arm, and two hawk’s bells which I placed on his ears—that is, the standard-issue trinkets of little value—and I ordered him back to his dugout.

009

Later, on Monday, October 15, his ships urged on by a southeasterly wind, Columbus cautiously navigated to another island, in all its features as described by Columbus consistent with Long Island, Bahamas. The island is eighty miles long and only four miles wide, and appears as a jagged pile of sand and rock rising above the surface of the ocean, which varies in hues from lush aubergine to sparkling white surrounded by a light blue corona.

Columbus kept his head about him as he gaped at the display and diligently recorded instructions for future navigators: You must keep your eyes peeled when you wish to anchor, and not anchor near the shore, although the water is always very clear and you see the bottom. And among all these islands at a distance of two lombard—or cannon—shots off-shore there is so much depth that you can’t find the bottom: advice for navigating Long Island that holds as true today as it did five centuries ago.

He was now almost as far north as he would go on this voyage, and once again his thoughts turned toward India. Columbus would have stayed to admire the setting—very green and fertile and the air very balmy, and there may be many things that I don’t know—but he was on a mission to find gold and the Grand Khan.

Complicating his task, he had entered into one of the most intricate mazes of islands and isthmuses on the planet. From the vantage point of the thermosphere, hundreds of miles above, the islands appear as scattered, burnished leaves flecked with gold and floating on liquid sapphire, slowly churning, blossoming, and fluorescing. From sea level, as Columbus and his men saw them, they were no less striking, seeming to rise from the heaving surface of the sea like apparitions, or fragments of stars or asteroids fallen to earth.

The people he encountered appeared to be participating in a timeless pageant, and Columbus, ever curious, jotted down his impressions. In the channel running between Santa María and Long Island, he came upon a man alone in a dugout canoe, paddling from one island to the other. He carried a bit of his bread that would be about the size of your fist, and a calabash of water, and a lump of bright red earth powdered and then kneaded, and some dry leaves which must be something much valued among them, since they offered me some . . . as a gift. The dry leaves happened to be among the oldest crops known to humanity, yet it was virtually unknown in Europe. Apparently, the leaves had been cured, and their pungent scent lingered in the air and imbued the pores of every one who handled it and inhaled its smoke. The leaves belonged to genus Nicotiana: the tobacco plant.

The man came alongside Santa María and gestured that he wished to come aboard. Columbus granted the request and had his dugout hoisted on deck, and all he brought guarded, and ordered him to be given bread and honey and drink. The Admiral vowed to give him back all his stuff, that he may give a good account of us and report that he was given all he needed by the emissary of the beneficent Sovereigns of Spain.

Late on October 16, Columbus’s modest altruistic gesture paid generous dividends. The fleet happened to be in search of anchorage, frustrated by the inability of soft coral reefs to provide a reliable stay against the agitation of the sea. The man whom he had given water, nourishment, and transport noticed the situation. He had given such a good account of us that all this night aboard the ship [that] there was no want of dugouts, which brought us water and what they had. I ordered each to be given something, if only a few beads, 10 or 12 glass ones on a thread, and some brass jingles, such as are worth in Castile a maravedí each—a Spanish coin worth about twelve cents.

Overcoming his reluctance to disembark, Columbus went ashore on Long Island, and was pleasantly surprised by the inhabitants, a somewhat more domestic people, and tractable, and more subtle, because I observe that in bringing cotton to the ship and other things, they know better how to drive a bargain than the others. To his relief, the islanders wore clothing, which seemed to reflect their sophistication and civility. I saw clothes of cotton made like short cloaks, and the people are better disposed, and the women wear in front of their bodies a small piece of cotton which barely covers their genitals.

Lush, dark vegetation blanketed the island. Impenetrable mangroves overhung ledges, casting dismal shadows. Spiky beach plums obstructed the way to the island’s interior. Those able to hack a path through the brush might come upon a basin of murky water swaying within a deep blue hole. In another part of the island, caves tempted the bravest or most foolhardy to explore their depths. It was all strange and different from anything the men had ever witnessed. I saw many trees very unlike ours, Columbus marveled, and many of them have their branches of different kinds, and all on one trunk, and one twig is of one kind and another of another, and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder of the world. How great is the diversity of one kind from the other! He had stumbled across flora following a separate evolutionary path from its European counterparts. Catching his breath, he resumed, For instance, one branch has leaves like a cane, others like mastic; and thus on one tree five or six kinds, and all so different. How could this be? They were not grafted by human hands, for one can say the grafting is spontaneous. No matter what plant Columbus was describing, his astonishment was apparent. The same wild proliferation could be found among fish—so unlike ours that it is marvelous; they have some like dories, of the brightest colors in the world, blue, yellow, red, and of all colors, and others painted in a thousand ways; and the colors are so bright, that there is no man would not marvel and would not take great delight in seeing them; also there are whales. Sheer surprise and enchantment hijacked his grandiose agenda. Or were the snares of this world leading him fatally astray?

Columbus, normally so purposeful, wandered through the Bahamas for a full week, as if through a dreamscape. I discovered a very wonderful harbor with one mouth, or rather one might say two mouths, for it has an island in the middle, and both are very narrow, and within it is wide enough for 100 ships, if it were deep and clean, he recorded on October 17 as he approached Cape Santa María. During this time I walked among some trees which were the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen, viewing as much verdure in so great development as in the month of May in Andalusia, and all the trees were as different from ours as day from night. He was charmed and baffled by the spectacle. Nobody could say what they were, nor compare them to others of Castile. The sights of so many unidentifiable trees and plants and flowers caused him great grief, almost as if he were blind or speechless.

Only gold roused him from his reveries. The moment he spotted a man who had in his nose a gold stud engraved with characters, he urgently tried to strike a deal, and they answered me that never had anyone dared to barter for it. If his intuition proved correct, the gold stud bore Chinese or perhaps Japanese inscriptions, but he was unable to examine it.

The next day [t]here came so fair and sweet a smell of flowers and trees from the land, that it was the sweetest thing in the world. And ahead, a smaller island, and another, so many that he despaired of exploring them all because I couldn’t do it in fifty years, for I wish to see and discover the most that I can before returning to Your Highnesses (Our Lord willing) in April. Fifty years: he was just beginning to appreciate the enormity and incomprehensibility of the lands he had found. Everything was strange and different—the vegetation, the people, the musky odor of flowers wafting from a nearby island. It was only October, the New World only a week old in his awareness. More than six months remained until he was due back in Spain, and anything could happen in this unexplored world.

As the entries in his diary increased, he related his experiences at sea with confidence and eloquence. On its surface, the diary is meant to convey the startling drama and novelty of his voyage, in which everything was a discovery, every experience and sensation was being registered for the first time by the European sensibility, and with European sensitivity—more specifically, the regal Castilian sensibility that Columbus longed to emulate. He tried to blend imperiousness and intelligence, as if holding the world at arm’s length to study it. For Columbus, an expatriate from Genoa, a merchant sailor and self-taught navigator, the aristocratic tone was a carefully crafted impersonation notable for what he omitted or downplayed or misunderstood as much as the startling discoveries he recorded.

As his voyage proceeded, the diary subtly transformed itself into a manifesto of discovery, and beyond that, a mirror into which he could not stop looking as it came to reflect his vision, his ambition, his will to greatness, himself. In his own mind, his experiences and observations were so persuasive that they interfered with his ability to respond to the ever-changing reality of exploration. Instead, he was confined by his rigid expectations.

To complicate matters, students of his remarkable diary must rely on a transcription of the original journal of the first voyage, which has been lost. It comes down through two main sources. The first is Columbus’s natural, or illegitimate, son Ferdinand, a sailor turned historian; the second is Bartolomé de Las Casas, the friar and chronicler. Ferdinand naturally sought to burnish his father’s tarnished reputation, while Las Casas sought a deep enough circle in hell in which to cast the explorer. But Las Casas’s attitude toward Columbus is more nuanced than that of a single-minded critic. He was aware of the complexity of the undertaking, to which he was an eyewitness and participant, yet also capable of seeing events in a larger historical context, living both in the moment and out of it. He lacked a holograph—the handwritten version—of the journal; instead, he worked from a flawed version about which he registered occasional scholarly complaints. In addition to routine copying errors, the unknown scribe on whom Las Casas relied had a troubling tendency to confuse miles with leagues, and even east with west. Such mistakes made it difficult to retrace Columbus’s route precisely.

As a champion of the dignity and human rights of the Indians, Las Casas included numerous passages in which Columbus admired his hosts. Las Casas switches frequently between direct quotation of the copy before him, in which Columbus speaks in the first person, and detailed summaries in which the Admiral is referred to in the third person, giving the impression that Columbus, like Caesar, referred to himself in that manner. (The scrupulous Las Casas distinguishes between the two by using quotation marks for direct quotations.)

Columbus’s vague, occasionally deceptive reports of tides, harbors, shoals, and sailing tactics complicated matters further. These descriptions were destined to cause centuries of chroniclers and would-be explorers to gnash their teeth over the absence of precise and useful navigational information—which was Columbus’s intention. Divulging his navigational theories and practices ran counter to his ingrained Genoese instincts as a pilot and mariner. It was more dangerous to reveal than conceal; if he was not careful, he might find himself marooned in Seville, or Lisbon, watching copycat missions exploit his discoveries. So he fell back on generic descriptions of beaches, harbors, tides, and shoals in an effort to cover his wake even as he wrote with an eye on posterity.

Alternately puzzled and overconfident, he wrestled with the most basic problem of exploration: his location. His subject was his discovery of India, but his principal concern remained himself, his travails, and his sense of heroism. Whenever Columbus stood outside the momentous events of explorations and calmly retold his account, the unfolding of God’s will became an important theme; when he was in the service of the Lord, there were no accidents, only degrees of devotion. In the service of the Lord, he saw himself as a priest of exploration.

But when Columbus’s convictions outran reality, or when his vanity and anxiety got the better of him, he succumbed to his darker instincts. He seemed oblivious to the well-being of others, and alarmingly ready to sacrifice all for an exalted, unattainable goal, whether it was the discovery of the Grand Khan’s empire or the liberation of Jerusalem. In these dramas, he saw himself as a tormented, heroic figure. The greater his fantasies, the more inhuman he became. His journal, in part a record of his passionate instability, records some of his suffering from a sense of dread and oppression, relieved mainly by intimations of glory and omnipotence. He was more than a discoverer, he was an intensifier of both his voyages and his inner struggles. This penchant for self-dramatization is part of the reason Columbus’s exploits are so memorable; he insisted on making them so.

As the journal gathered substance, it became an important record of the voyage, the rudder of the Admiral’s psyche, a stay against both actual and psychic storms. It was not, however, a source of comfort to Columbus. In place of the expected sense of vindication, the Admiral often sounds ever more frantic and embattled by his discoveries and their challenges. He becomes aware that he is entering into a lasting struggle in which every triumph seems to be accompanied by a misstep, unforeseen consequences, or even a potential crime. Paradoxically, as his power and prominence (in his own mind) increase, so does his vulnerability—to Indians, to rivals such as the Pinzón brothers, to a dimly perceived sense that the stakes of the voyage are higher and more ambiguous than those he originally formulated. Rather than finding a nautical analogue to Marco Polo’s travels, and a path to personal wealth, he had blundered into an other world, as he came to call it, where there were no maps to guide him. He was lost and misguided for all practical purposes, yet he could not admit that possibility to himself and the others on the voyage; it was much better to insist that he had not yet found what they sought, but that conviction alone did not offer much comfort. The more he found, the more frantic he became, as the empire he sought revealed itself to be greater and more varied than he had imagined.

As Columbus went island-hopping, marveling at the singing of the little birds and the grass like April in Andalusia, while he looked for gold, he heard from a cacique about a large island that the explorer reflexively decided must be Japan. And visiting that island nation, he was determined to go to the mainland, that is, China, and to the city of Quinsay, Marco Polo’s antique term for the Song dynasty capital, now known as Hangzhou, the richest and largest city in the medieval world. In this magnificent setting, Columbus imagined himself presenting Your Highnesses’ letters to the Grand Khan, and to beg a reply and come home with it.

Although he was situated in the midst of the Bahamas, he remained convinced that he had arrived at the doorstep of Asia. In reality, Quinsay lay more than eight thousand miles west of his position in the Caribbean, but these dimensions contradicted his firmly held assumptions about the size of the globe and the placement of continents—not that other navigators or cosmographers in Europe had a more accurate notion of these things. The precise globes that Columbus studied are not known, but one of the most influential representations of the day, by Martin Behaim, a German mapmaker in the service of Portugal, did indicate that Çipango was at hand. Columbus could not admit the possibility that these globes and all their assumptions might be spectacularly wrong.

When not contemplating his China delusion, Columbus returned to his other chimera: gold.

He spent a night and the following day, October 22, waiting to see if the king here or other people would bring gold or anything substantial. Many came to observe, some naked, others painted red, black, or white, offering cotton or other local items in exchange for simple European utensils. The only gold in evidence took the form of jewelry that some of the Indians wore hanging from the nose. They were willing to exchange these items for hawk’s bells, but upon examining the haul, he complained, There’s so little that it is nothing at all.

From gold, his mind swung back to Asia. He reckoned he was but a day’s sail from Japan, or Çipango, not the eight thousand miles separating him from his improbable destination. On October 23, he wrote of blithely departing for Cuba, which I believe should be Çipango, to look for gold. On the globes that I saw, he reminded himself, it is in this region. So stated Martin Behaim.

At midnight, Columbus weighed anchor and shaped a course for Cuba, but by nightfall he had nothing to show for his brave effort, as the wind blew up brisk and I didn’t know how far it was to the island of Cuba. Accordingly, he lowered sail, except for the forecourse, until rain caused him to furl that sail as well. So it went for four days, and how it rained!

On Sunday, October 28, he entered a deep, unobstructed river—perhaps Bahía Bariay in Cuba—and anchored within its protective embrace, where he beheld trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours. He labored over his descriptions of flora and fauna with extreme care, as if the natural bounty could substitute or distract from the wonders he had failed to find so far—gold, spices, and tangible evidence of the Grand Khan, whom he had crossed an ocean to see, without realizing that two oceans, and two centuries, separated them.

Instead, he wrote of flowers and